A life problematic with Wes

As the US director unveils another ornate film in this week’s The Phoenician Scheme’, Adam White asks if he’s too big to fail and if the familiarity of his style is halting his evolution

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A curious thing about Wes Anderson, the immaculately tailored king of immaculately tailored cinematic trifles, is that he doesn’t get bad reviews. Not really, anyway. His films, from the ornate The Grand Budapest Hotel to this week’s delectable The Phoenician Scheme, earn the most effusive raves imaginable or shrugging, innocuous whiffs. And that’s more or less been the case since 2004’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, a dazzling tribute to oceanic voyage that, despite its many fans, including myself, was met with such critical disdain at its time of release that it sent Anderson into an emotional tailspin.

It remains the only time in Anderson’s 12-film career (plus a handful of recent Netflix shorts) in which ill-feeling properly engulfed his output. Not that the specific criticisms back then (Anderson is “frozen into a mannerism”, wrote The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane) would necessarily feel out of place in reviews of his subsequent eight movies. Instead, those mannerisms – the obsessive detailing and fondant fancy scenery, the deadpan affect of his actors, those clean, boxy typefaces – have been doubled down upon and, moreover, embraced. So much of modern American cinema seems style-resistant, stories conveyed via sludgy, Brothers Russo-ian grey, that it feels baffling – insane, even – to condemn a filmmaker still interested in raw, aesthetic beauty.

Anderson does continue to evolve as a screenwriter, with both The Phoenician Scheme and his spacey 2023 black comedy